To the Editor:

I was enchanted by Dorothy Rabinowitz’s “Summer of ’72” [November 1972], showing us a batch of Jewish intellectuals sitting around a seaside cottage and straining at gnats. They were so accurately drawn, even to the poor little unspanked four-year-old, that I experienced a pure (if unavoidably grim) thrill of recognition.

And then, a little later, came the clap of recognition—the big Oh, that’s what accurate observation is for, I suppose. Because, like Norman Podhoretz, I had seen the irrational quality in some liberals’ opposition to Nixon, but it wasn’t until I read, “Here are Jews who wish more than anything to transcend being Jews” that I understood: the Jews Miss Rabinowitz was talking about begin their transcendence by choosing a “Jew” to take their place. In short, Richard Nixon is what you might call the liberal-Jews’ Jew.

Once you see this, everything falls into place: Nixon is clearly the victim of restrictive covenants which anyone who’s ever watched gentleman’s-agreement anti-Semitism in action can recognize at once (and a good many did on Election Day, apparently). He has to work harder than any gentleman is expected to, never gets a break from any but his own kind, and the only reason he can get in at all is that the old-boy network can’t keep him from making the highest mark on the entrance exam. But in Nixon’s case, intelligence is defined as wiliness, energy as pushiness—anybody here recognize this technique? And a willingness to reverse himself when his chosen remedy for inflation didn’t work was defined as lack of principle even while the liberals were grooving on McGovern’s call for a President who would have the courage to change his mind.

But economic controls didn’t constitute the only liberal neighborhood where property values seemed to go down sharply when Nixon moved in. There was an almost audible gasp here in Academia, Massachusetts when Nixon actually proposed what amounted to a guaranteed minimum income; after a moment (doubtless to allow for reversing gears), though, the Harvard voices lined up on the local public-TV channel, ready to teach me and thee that, though American liberals had long maintained the necessity of doing something like what Nixon proposed, the idea was now tainted. A baby with that name on its birth certificate was just ineligible, that’s all. (And if Nixon thought he could get around it by marrying Pat Moynihan, he had another think coming: the intelligent, energetic, adaptable Moynihan, it was quickly seen, must have had a Jewish grandmother.) All around me, I found homeowners in my liberal neighborhood setting up For Sale signs on their front lawns. Indeed, some of them got so frantic that they were willing to move quite near William F. Buckley, Jr., whose neighborhood they had in the past always declared quite undesirable.

I needn’t list the other dreams that became nightmares simply by appearing in a Nixon address—e.g., an end to knee-jerk anti-Communism, which was what one might have thought diplomacy with Russia and China meant, until it was Nixon who did it—because the sound of strained machinery was reaching more ears than just mine. I suspect the rise in the black vote for Nixon came from those experienced with the kind of racism that shows up when you embarrass the intellectuals by getting off the black-studies reservation and making it in the real world; those people proved to have a keen ear, too. So did some Irish who remember when Grace Kelly’s father could row all right but didn’t have gentlemanly enough antecedents to make the crew. And then there are the Italians, Poles, Slavs, and Greeks—all of them, like the Jews, perhaps had names too difficult for the fourth-grade teacher, who gave the class the impression that anything more complicated than Perkins was somehow déclassé

I don’t know for sure, of course, . . . but I have a feeling that it was the image of Nixon as the liberal-Jews’ Jew that was responsible for Nixon voters turning out as if they were rallying to support an underdog in spite of Nixon’s huge lead in the polls. It was like Shakespeare’s comedies: you have to laugh, but you know what you’re giggling at is also the stuff of tragedy.

Maggie Rennert
Somerville, Massachusetts